Empowered Leaders

A Social Justice Curriculum for Gifted Learners, Grades 6-8

Bryan Kirby, Jessica Stargardter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032219158
• eBook ISBN: 9781000575552
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Empowered Leaders provides educators with a practical guide for incorporating critical social justice themes into enrichment programming for gifted students in grades 6-8.

Featuring options for differentiation, digital learning, and talent development, each chapter offers detailed lesson plans and activities based around grade level themes that build as the students progress through middle school. Accessible and reader-friendly, lessons are student-centered and designed to foster globally conscious thought, empathetic discourse, and sustainable problem-solving skills.

Ideal for individual, co-teaching, or small group programs, this helpful resource equips teachers with the tools to incorporate social justice into any subject or classroom.

National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) Curriculum Network Annual Curriculum Award 2020

Chapter 1 Cultivating a Social Justice Mindset in Gifted Learners

DOI: 10.4324/9781003270560-1

Social Justice Education

The term “social justice” is thrown around a lot nowadays. It’s molded and squeezed to fit into companies’ mission statements and people’s Instagram captions. Its buzzword status waters down the meaning and can evoke groans in people who take true action against injustice. This chapter is about ironing out the trendy nature of this phrase and urging real action in its place. We will outline the need for more social justice focused classrooms for gifted learners, as well as the logistics of incorporating this mindset into your instruction. Empowered Leaders is about fighting for educational equity for all students with gifts and talents by cultivating a social justice mindset.

For some teachers, infusing social justice into classroom lessons can be daunting, overwhelming, and sometimes even looked down upon by administrators and/or families. Other teachers have been discussing these topics for many years, navigating the obstacles and successes as they come. We hope you can use this book, no matter where you are in your journey of creating a social justice focused classroom.

According to the United Nations, “social justice is an underlying principle for peaceful and prosperous coexistence within and among nations. We advance social justice when we remove barriers that people face because of gender, age, race, ethnicity, religion, culture or disability” (2020). The United Nations’ pursuit of social justice is at the core of every decision they make in carrying out their mission. The same should be true for every decision an educator makes in their classroom or in their school district at large.

Social Justice in education is “both a process and a goal”. The end goal is “full and equal participation of all groups in a society that is mutually shaped to meet their needs” (Bell, 1997, p. 3). It is a commitment to challenge inequalities based on power and privilege. This curriculum can be part of your process and goal for creating more equitable gifted programs and providing opportunities for your students to engage in discussions and projects about the world around them.

Topics taught in a social justice focused classroom may include race and racism, gender identity, class, privilege, climate change, human rights and the list goes on. However, it is not only about the topics. Social justice education is about the mindset educators cultivate in their students. With all the content knowledge in the world, students still need to be taught the critical thinking skills that go along with becoming collaborative, open-minded, justice-seeking citizens. We hope to not only empower future leaders, but to also empower current teachers to rethink the education of gifted learners through a social justice lens.

A Social Justice Lens

Empowered Leaders is a curriculum for gifted learners with a focus on social justice. This lens can be applied to any content area or curriculum. It can be applied to any set of standards and any classroom setting.

This lens is important because gifted learners grow up to be in positions of power (See Chapter 2). There are a few ways in which this impending power makes a social justice mindset and curriculum important. Those identified as “gifted” in K –12 education are disproportionately white. This disproportionality is also apparent in the leadership of our major companies, political parties, and government systems. If white students grow up to be top earners, leading groups of people, it is imperative that they also can use their privilege to fight unjust systems. Therefore, teaching white students the importance of social justice is extremely important (Ford, 2011; Kleinrock, 2021). Empowered Leaders is the framework to begin cultivating a social justice mindset in these future leaders.

Just as we want white students to grow up to dismantle systems that perpetuate injustice, we recognize the inequities within the system of gifted programs that prevent students of color from being in these programs. Empowered Leaders hopes to tackle disproportionality in gifted programs by empowering teachers to spot the talent in students of color, multilingual learners, Twice Exceptional (2e) learners, and students from low-income communities. By providing a structured, rigorous curriculum that holds a mirror to potentially gifted students, we hope that general education teachers will have a clearer opportunity to identify students.

Incorporation of Social Justice Education

Across the nation, there are many ways students with gifts and talents are serviced. Not only are there different definitions labeling our students state to state, but there are also different mandates, laws, identification protocols, programs, and curricula. It can be difficult to discern what is best practice. The key to a good curriculum for the gifted is to be flexible in its application. We hope you can implement this curriculum no matter what your services look like.

Here are a couple of situations in which social justice education can be incorporated into your school or classroom effectively.

Homogenous Group Setting

For school districts that encourage pull-out services, cluster grouping, or homogenous grouping for gifted learners, social justice education could be extremely beneficial. If you are working with a group of only gifted learners, you can focus your teaching completely on social justice education. While you may still have variation in your group that requires differentiation, you may not need as many scaffolds for your students to access the content. Your group may also have more background information in terms of academic vocabulary, research skills, and content-specific knowledge. This can be beneficial to you as a teacher because you can engage your students in deeper conversations and more rigorous application of knowledge and higher order thinking.

For example, if you are incorporating the topic of climate change into your lessons, a homogenous group of gifted learners may already have a basic understanding of climate change. You may be able to skip more introductory information on the topic and dive deeper into how climate change disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color. You may be able to have a Socratic Seminar (see Chapter 3) on the effects of fracking on indigenous populations in the United States. An in-person or digital discussion with a young climate activist may also bring the real-world spark to your classroom. All these examples would be beneficial to all populations of students, but the pace at which teachers can implement these exercises can be faster with a group of gifted learners. There can also be a stronger emphasis on intersectional and critical thinking and independent or collaborative research.

Heterogenous Group Setting

Other gifted services may include co-teaching or a single teacher differentiating across multiple ability levels. In a classroom with a wide range of learners, teaching social justice topics is still possible, and encouraged. The Empowered Leaders curriculum can be implemented just as effectively in a classroom of mixed abilities. By removing scaffolds for gifted learners, those students may be able to work quickly through information they have already mastered and move towards extension activities that may include project-based learning, choice boards, researching, or interacting with guest speakers or community mentors.

For example, a teacher can decide to do a unit on immigrants’ rights with a focus on lessons incorporating the Enrichment Triad Model (See Chapter 2). Gifted learners in the class may be able to work on finding immigrant advocacy groups in the community to contact while other students are learning content knowledge.

With a mixed group, teachers can also add scaffolds to the Empowered Leaders curriculum to service general education and special education students as well.

Afterschool Setting

The Empowered Leaders resources can make for great enrichment experiences or afterschool groups. Students who self-select to be in a group focused on social justice are more engaged and motivated by the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Author’s Note
• 1 Cultivating a Social Justice Mindset in Gifted Learners
• 2 Laying the Foundation: The Schoolwide Enrichment Model
• 3 How to Teach Social Justice in a Schoolwide Enrichment Model
• 4 Diversity
• 5 Justice
• 6 Action
• Afterword
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D
• Appendix E
• Appendix F
• Appendix G
• Appendix H